BookLife Review by Carol O'Day: The Berry Pickers, a Novel (Amanda Peters, author)
Child abduction, Maine, Nova Scotia, migrant farm workers, Indigenous people, Mi'Kmaq Nation, grief, betrayal, family secrets, dual narrative.
In July of 1962, a four-year old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from a community of Indigenous migrant workers picking blueberries in Maine. Despite a summer of searching, the child is
not found and the devastated family returns to Nova Scotia without her. The tragedy unhinges her brother Joe, only two years her senior, who was charged with watching her when she disappeared.
The Berry Pickers is told from the alternating points of view of the brother, Joe, and a woman named Norma who grows up in Maine as an only child in a secretive household with an unstable and overprotective mother. Norma’s mother suffered multiple miscarriages before Norma arrived. Norma is blessed with a feisty aunt, June, and her partner, Alice, who in some ways compensate for her troubled mother’s distance.
Spoiler alert. It becomes quickly apparent that Norma’s path will intersect with Joe’s and his family’s. But the grist of the story lies in the lives that unfold and the damage that ripples outward from the single, shared lost-child tragedy. Grief and guilt wrap around Joe and his parents and siblings and ultimately send Joe on a cross-country pilgrimage in search of peace and absolution. He only nibbles at it, finding small moments of peace in nature and hard work. In a parallel universe, Norma grows in a world of isolation, secrecy and betrayal. Her overprotective mother and conflict-avoidant father smother her with restrictions but are short on affection, fun and demonstrative love. Like Joe, Norma yearns for escape. After high school, she moves to Boston for college and immerses herself in the vibrant community in which Aunt June and her partner Alice live.
Though The Berry Pickers resolves the stories of Joe and Norma, ultimately intersecting them, the depth of the characters’ tragedies and losses is too great to allow for a truly happy ending. Joe criss-crosses the country, using distance and hard work to deter the magnetic pull of his family and the unborn child he unwittingly left in his wake. Norma spends a lifetime suppressing clues to her past and suffering the loss of one parent and then another betrayed by all those whom she trusts. She suffers a miscarriage and walks away from a marriage and possible future children. The best the reader can hope for these characters is to answer questions, heal wounds for a small measure of peace. It is the truth, once bared, that provides solace.
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